Time Travel 101

So Hurley's staring at his hand and he's like "So if Ben dies in the past I'm going to start disappearing right? So I have to go to the Enchantment Under the Sea Dance? And play Johnny B. Goode? I don't even know how to play the guitar..." "You've just proven there IS such a thing as a stupid question." "So seriously wait, I'm not going to disappear? Cause I don't think I can get my hands on a DeLorean any time soon. Miles: We're not here to change anything from the past. This has ALL happened already! We just didn't experience it yet! Whatever happened, happened! Audience: *lol episode title* Miles: Look, just relax. I'm just going to sit here and be all existential and read some Slaughterhouse Five and wait to disappear. Or not. “Whatever Happened, Happened” (via TVgasm)

Time Travel 101 Meanwhile back in the house, Hurley and Miles are still discussing the finer points of time travel. Miles: Now, you're looking at now. Everything that happens now is happening now. Hurley: What happened to then? Miles: We passed then. Hurley: When? Miles: Just now. Were at now, now. Hurley: Go back to then! Miles: When? Hurley: Now. “Whatever Happened, Happened” (via TVgasm)

Time Travel 101 Miles: Now? Hurley: Now! Miles: I can't. Hurley: Why? Miles: We missed it. Hurley: When? Miles: Just now. Hurley: When will then be now? Miles: Soon. Hurley: Didn't Ack already use this joke this season? Miles: She used it in 2009, not in All part of the time travel, bro. Hurley: "So if now is now and then is then, then how come Ben doesn't know Sayid shot him when he was a kid?? *is actually out of smartass answers* “Whatever Happened, Happened” (via TVgasm)

Time

Time Travel 101 How, if some day or night, a demon were to sneak after you into your loneliness and say to you: "This life, as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and every sigh... must return to you all in the same succession and sequence even this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and even this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned over and over and you with it, a mere grain of dust." Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: "You are a god, and never did I hear anything more godlike!" If this thought were to gain possession of you, it would change you as you are, or perhaps crush you. The question in each and everything, "do you want this once more and innumerable times more?" would weigh upon your actions as the greatest stress. Or how well disposed would you have to become to yourself and to life to crave nothing more fervently than this ultimate eternal confirmation....?--Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science

Time Travel 101 "O Zarathustra," the animals said, "to those who think as we do, all things themselves are dancing: they come and offer their hands and laugh and flee and come back. Everything goes, everything comes back; eternally rolls the wheel of being. Everything dies, everything blossoms again; eternally runs the year of being. Everything breaks, everything is joined anew; eternally the same house is being built. Everything parts, everything greets every other thing again; eternally the ring of being remains faithful to itself. In every Now, being begins; round every Here rolls the sphere There. The center is everywhere. Bent is the path of eternity." Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

Time Travel 101 Time goes on and on and nothing that we expect ever comes about. This is perhaps because what we expect has already come; but God does not want us to know it.— Georges Bernanos

Time Travel 101 God cannot effect that anything which is past should not have been. It is more impossible than raising the dead.—Thomas Aquinas

Time Travel 101 Robert Heinlein observed that he did not expect time travel to exist in any foreseeable future.

Time & Narrative

Time Travel 101 “It is a great literary convenience to be able to move a narrative viewpoint backwards of forwards in time, and writers have always been prepared to use whatever narrative devices come to hand for this purpose.”— Malcolm J. Edwards and Brian Stableford, The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction

Time Travel 101 “Yes, it’s quite impossible, time travel... and infinitely fertile, artistically.”—Fritz Leiber

The History of Time Travel in SF

Time Travel 101 Prior to Wells’ “crucial breaththrough in narrative technology”—the invention of an actual time machine—time travel was accomplished through a suspension of consciousness or via sleep and/or dreams.— Malcolm J. Edwards and Brian Stableford, The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction

Time Travel 101 Primary Motives for Time Travel: Hunting dinosaurs Meeting famous people, ancestors Being a spectator at important historical events Preventing historical calamities

Time Travel 101 Mark Twain, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889)

Time Travel 101

Olaf Stapledon’s Last and First Men (1930) has the last species of man (the 18 th —on Neptune) able “to revive and love the past, share and so mitigate its buried horrors and wonders without otherwise changing the dense fabric of reality” (Leiber).

Time Travel 101

Several SF writers “have concluded that man should not be allowed to meddle so frivolously with the past, and a number of stories have been written around the theme of a corps of Time Police.” H. Beam Piper’s “Paratime” Series Poul Anderson’s Guardians of Time

Time Travel 101 Time After Time (Nicholas Meyer, 1979)

Time Travel 101 Ray Bradbury’s “A Sound of Thunder”

Time Travel 101

John Varley’s 1977 short story “Air Raid” is a mind- boggling science fiction classic about time-travelers from a technologically- advanced but horrendous future world afflicted by an epidemic “paraleprosy” eating away the bodies of all surviving humans. In order to procure not-yet- infected people to put on board spaceships with which they hope to flee a doomed earth and colonize other worlds, “Snatch Teams” are sent back in time to remove the airline passengers from planes about to crash. Narrated by Elfreda Baltimore-Louisville, “Air Raid” plunges readers into a snatch-in- progress. At first, we have no idea what to make of the odd goings-on. Why does the narrator look “like death” in the mirror? Why has she lost an ear? Why did a finger recently fall off in her sleep? Why, after dawning a plastic mask, does she announce “How nice to have lips”? Why are the narrator and her fellow Snatchers allowed “to eat five times their ration to stay presentable for the masquerade”? Gradually we begin to piece together the Snatchers’ nightmare world and their motives in stealing doomed passengers from a distant past.

Time Travel 101 Poulet, Georges. "The Phenomenology of Reading." Critical Theory Since Plato. Ed. Hazard Adams. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1971:

Paradox

Time Travel 101 Timeslip or time paradox stories began to appear as early as the 1930s.